Book review: Making breakthrough innovation happen by Porus Munshi

I had a chance to meet author Porus Munshi at the SAP Innovation meetup with the CMO of SAP, Jonathan Becher. Big thanks to my friend, Amarinder for inviting me to be a part of that event.

Its a breezy 234 page read with 11 stories from Indian companies that innovated on product (ITC eChoupal), marketing (Dainik Bhaskar) and process (Aravind Hospitals).

To make “orbit changing” innovation happen his recommendation is to set a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) and question every assumption. The second part is to come up with an “insight” that brings the innovation to life.

E.g. The BHAG for Aravind hospitals was to “Eliminate unnecessary blindness worldwide”. This requires operating on 24 Million people. Any eye surgeon can operate on 10-15 a day, so that’s a lot of eye specialists required.

The insight the obtained was from McDonalds where the entire “process” was streamlined as a manufacturing assembly unit with no compromises on quality.

So Aravind hospitals redefined the operating process and made it similar to an assembly line, which enables their doctors to operate on 3 times the number of patients possible, with no compromise on quality.

There are many other stories including innovations at city of Surat, Trichy police, Cavin Kare, etc.

I finished the book in under 3 hours, so its not a textbook, but more like a case study compilation.

If you are in Bangalore and want the book to read (you can pass it on to someone else after you finish), drop me an email and I can have it delivered. Or if you want to pick it up, my office is at Cunningham Road.